Week Nine: The Importance of Planning

Last year was my first year teaching and I lean to that knowledge a lot in this class, but more than that teaching is where I belong, where I have purpose. For a variety of reasons, I am not teaching this year and am back at my office job. Many misconceptions circulated as to why I was back in the office: 1. I’d been let go; 2. I hated teaching; 3. I couldn’t handle the student. All of these are false, I was begged to stay at my school, I miss teaching more than anything I’ve ever missed, and yes, on days I had trouble handling my high schoolers, but on the whole the student respected me well enough to mind me. Ultimately, I needed to get my head on straight to protect myself, not from the students, but from the administration and other teachers. I needed a strong game plan and I had none, especially subjects I’d never even taken classes on.

A student of mine from last year, who is now in school at CU Boulder, informed me this week that he wanted to be a teacher. We had quite a long IM conversation last week about the kind of teacher he wanted to be and the kind of teacher I was. He asked me what I’ll do different next time I teach: hand down, I’ll have a better game plan, and if it isn’t working, it will be changed at quarters or semesters, not when I realize it isn’t working. As I explained to him, sometimes you have the grandest ideas on paper, but when you implement them, things fall apart. Teaching is harder than people think, not because of the students or parents, but purely from the behind-the-scenes planning and the way it consumes your life.

Besides being stuff I’ve needed to get off my chest for a while, how is all this wonderful reflection related to last week’s discussion? Well, we’ve been talking about the hardest part of teaching – the planning; in our case, the design.

In our smaller five people groups, we each picked a quote and commented on each others and at the end we posted a “Last Post.” I’m still trying to figure out how this is different from the “Final Post,” but that is beside the point. Most of our quotes signified important points to remember in planning, but served more as “Duh!” points for me than “Hmm….I never thought of that” points. The first four quotes, including my own, dealt with hooking your audience, the bad reps lectures get when they shouldn’t, not giving students the same information again when they didn’t get it the first time and getting into the content as quickly as possible. The final quote, which wasn’t really a quote at all, had the most “Ah-haness” to it for me.

Eileen posted the page where we could find a chart. At first this frustrated me, because I was trying to respond to everyone’s quotes at work and did not have my book and therefore could not respond to hers. But, as this quote caused me to be most reflective in my own teaching styles, it’s the one that stand out the most.

From Advanced Web-Based Training Strategies by Margaret Driscoll and Saul Carliner, Page 284:

Although Eileen and I continued to have a discussion about this after her last post, I felt my first remarks to her were my most important of the week:

“I think I've always been on the side of getting my student's to think for themselves. Many times I've felt lazy as a teacher for doing this, but I'm learning more and more that students get more when they make the meaning themselves and are reinforced with a yes that's right or a follow-up leading question, than when they are handed the answer.”

Eileen stated she thought this was interesting, I don’t quite know what that means, but today as I sat down to write this blog I began to think. The reason I feel lazy is because I’m on the passive side of the chart. I’m waiting for the descriptive summary, but I’m not actively engaged in it. This might be why most of my group seems to be unable to let the student create the summaries, if they do that, not only do they lose control, but they also are less active in the teaching and therefore don’t feel like successful.

Week Eight: Practice

I’ve read a few other classmates blogs….in a way I feel I’m intruding on others private thoughts. And then I wonder, is anyone besides Dave reading my blogs? Can I make these blogs less formal than they’ve been? I mean, I do like to write, but I’ve always been short and concise with “school” work. In my perusal of others’ blogs, I’ve noticed a few posting photos and not that the photo has anything to do with the Discussion, but I find I’m a visual person and I like that small little addition.

So today I add a photo. I took it a few weeks ago, but I took a long walk today and the signs of fall are everywhere. The crinkling of the leaves, the vivid colors, the crisp air….oh, I do love fall. :-)

Onward to the discussion: Last week we were still divided into our smaller groups, I think there might be three, but we had two different discussions to participate in. My intention was to participate in both, but I found myself wanting to practice responses to students or conference participants and so I did, but between the six questions and the other discussion, the group discussion in the practice section was sparse and I felt myself wondering if I misread the directions or if the other in the group misread the directions, because we didn’t seem to be responding in the same way. Most of the other group members responded to the question…..I felt very strongly that we weren’t to respond to the question, but to redirect the “student” that had responded or rephrase the question, so that’s what I did.

I think my most valuable contribution was:

This question has bothered me all week. I'm very frustrated with the student response because it is very obvious that it does not answer the question, but I thought the questions was very straight forward and didn't leave room for this sort of response, so I don't know how to reword it and to the student I just want to say....did you read the directions? Start again, which is not encouraging at all and will just cause the student to be frustrated and give up. Help anyone?

Unfortunately, no one in my group wanted to discuss this with me, but I thought I was asking a very valuable question. Maybe everyone felt the same way I did and couldn't shed any light on it either. Thankfully, Joni was very active in our "discussion" this week. Joni’s insight into the fact that sometimes we have to encourage students and “remind them of the directions” was very helpful. Sometimes when I feel my direction can not be improved and still the student isn’t responding correctly, I get frustrated and feel like I’ve failed. It was good to hear that sometimes, all we can do is remind them, that it isn’t always MY fault, there are a variety of reasons why they might have answered incorrectly and in the online environment isn’t probably that the rushed through reading the directions.

Week Seven: Informal Learning

The discussion this week was a little bit different. For the first half of the week, we responded to five questions. Some of these questions didn’t seem to have anything to do with our class, for example: What do you know more about than Joni and Dave? It was enjoyable to read through the answers and learn more about my classmates. At the beginning of the semester I was overwhelmed with everyone’s names, I couldn’t keep anyone straight. I guess when you are in a class you have a visual and sounds to help you know who is who. Anyway, everyone’s personalities are coming out in the discussions now and it isn’t as difficult for me to follow conversations.

After we answered these questions we went back to our group to discuss what we learned about informal learning from questions. My most important contribution came in my first post, which was also the group’s first post. In it I stated:

“At the very base, these are things we find interesting and important. Most of the time we educate ourselves in these areas and we have quite a few similarities, so there is probably and audience out there looking for self-paced course.”

I think this was a good start to our discussion because it was a very broad overview and gave everyone a place to leave from. Other ideas that were discussed include: the necessity for informal learning to be relaxed, intriguing, self-directed and that the internet is a perfect place for this type of thing. I mean, if we really think about it, how many arguments are solved everyday, by people searching for the answer to a question online? I’m sure quite I few. Which just shows the power of informal learning.